India was rendered socialist through welfare “schemes.”
Each scheme is basically waste of the most precious resource of the country: Capital. Schemes means the money has been taken away from the productive through taxes, and sunk into the black hole of a government programme. 66 schemes means that there is a huge bureaucracy feeding off the schemes, and a bottomless source of corruption income.
Anang Pal Malik in his book Corruption In India ( to download your free copy of the book, go here.), says that socialism is the root cause of corruption in India. It places in the hands of bureaucracy and politicians other people’s money, to redistribute, out of which they keep an unspecified share for themselves. And from there, corruption travels in all directions in the economy, and society.
Last year, money spent on “schemes” was Rs 2,41,320 crore. It can be readily seen that a great infrastructure can be built with that kind of money, which would create equal employment directly (equal to what is sought to be created through schemes), and fillip to investment that would create huge employment indirectly.
“NEW DELHI: Centrally Sponsored Schemes (CSS), representing a significant quantum of discretionary trans- fers from Centre to states, may be overhauled following the 14th Finance Commission’s decision to enhance automatic transfers to states.
The commission report outlines the antipathy of states to CSS, an important source of discretionary transfer for social sector development activities. States felt these schemes restricted their fiscal space and took a one-size-fits-all approach. Consequently, states wanted the commission to enhance untied transfers to them.
According to the commission, the growing spread of CSS has constitutional implications. They at times strayed into areas earmarked for states in the Constitution.
In terms of allocations, CSS represent a significant proportion of Plan transfers to states. In Budget estimates of 2014-15, CSS allocation was Rs 2,41,320 crore, of which 81% was to flagship schemes.” (from the article)
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